Forecast

Jail classes led to much better life

By John Crutchfield, Commentary
| on March 4, 2014

The week Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced plans to fund college classes in New York state prisons, I celebrated two years out of Auburn Correctional Facility and the Cornell University classes I took there. His proposal reminded me of a drug rehab saying I now take to heart: "If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always gotten."

I had served 8½ years, and it was my second term in prison. The first time, I served nearly 4½ years, then broke the law within four months of my release.

Addiction made me stupid. I would get sober for a while, begin building a life and doing well, and then I would use drugs again until I destroyed everything I built and sank to new lows. It seemed like my brain never got enough time to heal well enough to think.

I continued using drugs and drinking homemade alcohol for the first couple of years I was in prison, but in 2005 I went to solitary confinement for three months and was transferred to Auburn prison, where my outlook began to change. Cornell University had been offering college classes taught by volunteers. When I began my ten-year sentence for robbery and escape, I hoped to become a writer. However, without formal training and mentoring, everything I submitted for publication was rejected.

A year after completing my first Cornell writing class, a small essay I wrote about prison food was printed in the Ithaca Journal.

The struggle toward publication taught me my most valuable lessons. I learned discipline and how to manage criticisms instead of reacting to them. I became attracted to decent people who did things well. And I hate to admit it, but being busy locked in my cell gave my brain enough time to heal and develop maturity. Before leaving prison, I published three more op-ed pieces, including one about voting rights that ran on Election Day in 2008, and an autobiographical essay that received honorable mention in the book, "Best American Essays 2011."

I never got a degree or had a career as a writer. What happened is a long story that revolves around the friends I made as a college student. My business began as an act of gratitude. I fixed a clogged drain for a friend who gave me a couch to sleep on when I was released from prison in 2012. At the time, I was struggling to find a job. That clogged drain led to a new sink I got paid to install. Then my professor needed his deck painted, and the couch friend had a friend who needed some shelves put in. Within two months I had a bag of tools and a bicycle. Six months later, I had a van I bought with cash and a You Tube channel I created to show what I could do.

College, for me, wasn't about the degree. It was an opportunity to learn skills I could transfer to more practical objectives. The act of completing an essay on time turned into the practice of showing up every day and serving a customer until the job is done. The research I do today is profitable. The questions I asked in those prison classrooms, the advice I took and the powerful emotions I learned to manage all help me navigate the new life I now live in Ithaca.